


Lighter Waters

by stoic_swan



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:08:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28673490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoic_swan/pseuds/stoic_swan
Summary: Flash fic challenge: Will's dreams change, and so does he. (Mizumono)
Relationships: Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter
Kudos: 25
Collections: Hannibal Flash Fic Week 1





	Lighter Waters

Far ahead, the water sparkled in streaks of gold, blue, and white. Around Will’s hips, however, his stream was tinged steel gray and green, dirtied by sediment swept over the time-smoothed rocks. The rush of water drowned out all other noise, steadier than the roar of blood in his ears; he welcomed the quiet. As the spring sun set over the horizon, illuminating the faraway twists of the stream in warmer hues, he waded deeper, the rocky bottom gone from sight. Will reached his hands out in a T to catch the warm breeze as it chilled in the setting sun, only his eyes and the curls of his hair kissed by the dying light now. He didn’t notice his pole was no longer in his hands. When he let his fingertips drop to skim the surface of the water, it felt almost warm to the touch. But Will’s stream was never warm-- not even in the throbbing heat of a Virginia summer and certainly not in mid-spring. 

He was dreaming. With that realization, some ten yards ahead, the inky tips of antlers began to rise above the surface of the water. 

The antlered man born of darkness-- _Maneater. Shapeshifter. Wendigo. Hannibal._ \-- would glide upward to his full, impossible height and block the horizon, all light disappearing behind him. The creature would approach Will, cutting through the water like a ship, and Will would allow it. When it stood before him and reached out its curved, powerful claws, Will would reach back. In the second before monster met man, the ground would crumble, and Will would fall deeper and deeper into the sickeningly warm pit of blackening water. This ritual occurred every night. Only Will’s knowledge that he and Jack were two days from the end of their own fishing expedition fueled him.

Perhaps it was inevitable with the end so seemingly near that Will’s mind would contort the shape emerging from the water from that of a man to a stag, fur and feathers glistening as it shook loose droplets clinging like diamonds amid coal. He was a familiar beast, one Will had come to expect in dire times when his brain was cooking within his skull. Water breaking against its immovable form, the stag craned its head to consider Will, then tilted its unreadable face skyward until its antlers grazed its back, the mane of feathers spreading around its throat. Will watched as the animal stared upward, considering this world it found itself in. By the time the stag looked squarely at Will once again, he was already moving toward it.

In his usual dream, when Will would reach out to meet the touch of the dark man’s claws, he recognized the touch meant mutual destruction: Will would sink, and the antlered man would be torn apart among the fragments of his breaking dream. Standing before the stag, though, Will couldn’t fathom what he reached for as his fingers found themselves buried amid ebony fur and feathers. The stag watched Will as he ruffled its mane almost lovingly; it remained still when one of his hands caressed upward to the place where skull and antler met, then higher still to stroke up a column of blackened bone. The stag’s eyes shifted toward the horizon first, and its body soon followed; Will gripped his hand around the antler and allowed his own form to be led where the placid beast chose. Their path toward the sun was uneven and the water deepened with each step forward, yet tucked beside the stag whose heart had begun to beat in time with Will’s own, there was no room for fear between them. Even when the water filled Will’s mouth and nose and covered his eyes, he held firmly and continued onward, matching the animal step for step.

Will’s world turned green as the water clouded his vision-- a distinct change from the typical inky seas of his dreams-- and he knew the stag was only a few steps from floating. Three steps, two steps, one step-- now the stag swam powerfully downward, far below where the ground should have been, and Will knew in his own black bones that if they continued plunging and did not waver, they would emerge somewhere new. Somewhere of his own making. Somewhere safe and warm and drenched in beauty. 

But beautiful things were not made for Will Graham. Before he and the stag crossed the depths back into the light of a strange world, the digital tones of a ringing phone wrenched him from sleep. He reached out blearily on instinct before he had fully opened his eyes, hit the answer button, and pressed the phone to his ear. A gruff voice greeted him. 

“Will.”

Will exhaled heavily and blinked a few times before responding, his eyes adjusting to the light. 

“What’s wrong, Jack?”

Even coming through the tinny speakers of a cell phone, Jack sounded formidable. 

“Alana is concerned about your mental state-- what you’re capable of.”

Will ran a hand back through his hair and planted it there. A dry sound rattled in his throat, not quite a laugh. 

“Good.”

“She threatened to go to Kade Prurnell.”

The weary sigh that immediately crossed Will’s lips told Jack he understood what hadn’t been said: Alana now knew they were setting a trap; Alana now knew Jack, too, believed Hannibal was the Chesapeake Ripper. 

“I need you to talk to her. She’s here now.”

When Will closed his eyes, he saw Alana’s face when he put the gun in her hands, confused and frightened. 

“On my way.”

The thought of Alana, alone with the knowledge of how wrong she had been, spurred him into motion. Even with seven dogs to tend to, it wasn’t long before he was on the road to Quantico. Jack met Will outside his office door and, without speaking, led him toward a small conference room down the hall. With one hand resting on the doorframe, Jack finally spoke to Will in a restrained, grave voice. 

“This doesn’t change anything.”

Will met his eyes, gaze even, and opened the door. Alana glanced up from the other end of the polished table, glassy eyes belying the dignity with which she still held herself. Neither spoke as Will closed the door behind him, Jack remaining out of sight, and made his way around the table to take the seat next to hers. For many minutes, Alana stared at her reflection in the mahogany table while Will watched her from the corner of his eye, his gaze fixed on nothing. 

“I haven’t slept in days,” Alana whispered. “Not truly slept.”

Will hung his head in understanding. He had spent many nights waiting for a sleep that wouldn’t come and countless more waking drenched in sweat after only a few hours of fitful rest. Alana blinked back the tears that threatened to spill; the dark circles under her eyes made her look older, weaker. When she spoke again, though, her voice was steady.

“In the few jerky seconds of sleep I do get, all I see is dark swarming behind my eyelids. I dream darkness comes into me. It comes and it's insidious. Up my nose, into my ears...damp fingers prying at me...finding every way inside. I feel poisoned.” 

Will could only reply, “We've all been poisoned.”

Alana was half-speaking to herself when she continued, “Even my memories are suspect. I keep compulsively poring over every moment I've spent with him, struggling to separate the man I know from the man you know.”

As Will’s chest clenched with the maddening elation of being believed by someone and knowing this belief could possibly save Alana’s life, his stomach tossed with pulses of cold anger.

Alana only believed him because Jack vouched for him.

Alana felt a new connection between them because they had both been fooled by the same man. 

Alana had the privilege of mourning the loss of a man who had never existed-- a privilege Will had not been extended as he sat locked in a cell. 

Alana would resume her previous life, more or less unchanged. 

Yet, this wasn’t Alana’s fault. She acted as any logical person would; she couldn’t know she was a pawn in an entirely illogical situation. Will swallowed back down the icy indignation rising from the pit of his stomach.

Sensing he was obligated to speak again, Will stated dispassionately, “I don't pretend to know him. I just understand him.”

“You saw what no one else could,” Alana corrected, clear-eyed through her tears. 

Will’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “To his benefit alone.”

Alana’s drying eyes burned Will’s face, scrutinizing every line and dip. 

“What aren’t you and Jack telling me?”

The huff of a stag’s breath rustled behind Will’s ear, warming the nape of his neck. 

“Blindness can function as a survival instinct when we find ourselves in inevitable situations. At some point, we have all closed our eyes, intentionally or not,” Will said to a point on the table where the overhead light was reflected in a waxy circle. “Choose not to see, Alana, for just a few days longer.”

Alana’s shoulders straightened as a thread pulled taught the muscles drooped in her earlier worrying. The spark of anger was nearly reassuring in its normalcy; her cutting words, however, were not. 

“Our circumstances are the same, Will. I have to wonder what you and Jack have chosen to blind yourselves to.” 

Will’s gaze was at last pulled to Alana’s at the unasked question. He recognized the fury threatening to catch light within her; he remembered too well the burn of a scream captured just behind his tongue. She would drown every night, alone in the dark, until a creature of her own imagining one day dragged her toward the light. 

“He’s let me see him now, Alana,” Will responded, confidence emerging without warning or falter. “Wants me to see him.” 

Alana’s eyes held no trace of their previous wateriness as she observed Will for several seconds, a clinical chill seeping into the space between them. He remained still, seasoned by his hours with a larger, more frightening predator. At last, she stood, eyes remaining fixed on Will’s closed face. 

“Oh, Will,” she admonished in a tone that scratched beneath his skin-- too sympathetic yet too distant. “You’re more than Hannibal’s mirror; I worry what you and Jack will find when you catch your own reflections. I hope Hannibal doesn’t see them first.”

Will bit back the acid that threatened to pour forth-- accusations of self-righteousness and jabs at the precise ways Alana enjoyed her own sightlessness. He let her leave without a further word, in part because he cared about her and in part because she was telling him the truth. 

The disconcerting thought circled him like an uncaged tiger. Will slipped through the halls of the BAU avoiding Jack and seeing shadows leaping at him from every corner, claws unsheathed and stripes blurring with motion. In the parking lot, the gray sky rolling overhead seemed less a sign of rain and more the shadow cast by a beast just beyond sight. The first fat drops of rain appeared on Will’s windshield only a few miles from his house, and he could almost breathe again. After letting his dogs out for a quick run as sprinkles of rain warned of the downpour foretold by the news, Will wandered his small sanctuary. This space had been invaded-- violated-- more than once now: Hannibal. The FBI. Freddie Lounds. Randall Tier. Still, Will found safety in the creak of the floorboard that lay three steps beyond the front door and the jigsaw thumbprint of his stone fireplace. Staring out the sizable window that had recently been replaced when a man in the suit of an animal crashed through it, Will wondered numbly if his home still recognized him. It had welcomed so many iterations of Will Graham now: Adjunct professor and potential doctoral student, healing from New Orleans. Full-time professor and occasional researcher. FBI special agent. Encephalitic madman. Redeemed shell. Wrathful fisherman. 

And now...

The moment he no longer wished for Hannibal to die, _wrathful_ no longer seemed apt. Standing shoulder-by-shoulder with the doctor the previous day, burning patients’ files and planning for a future that would never arrive, Will envisioned the man beside him in a cage of Will’s making and wanted to set fire to more than reams of paper. Fishermen weren’t meant to burn the world.

Will coached himself to take a deep breath in and release it slowly. Alana’s warning words and changing demeanor rattled him, and he had already started the day unsettled because of his odd dream and the simple fact that tonight’s dinner with Hannibal would be their last. The next evening, he and Jack would both join the doctor at his table, and yet another version of Will Graham would vanish so that a newer, stronger, truer one may be constructed. It was the story of Will’s life, it seemed. 

He shook himself loose from his reverie and, too unnerved to eat or read or do anything but think himself into corners, Will stretched out on his bed and listened to the rain beat heavier on the roof. Paws tapped into the room a few at a time until all seven of his dogs surrounded him, agreeing that a rainy day was as good of a time as any for a nap. Will closed his eyes and let his body sink into the mattress. 

Will wasn’t surprised to find himself in his stream again. Before last night, he prized the few moments of tranquility he was gifted at the beginnings of his dreams when he needed only to stand in a stream and exist. There was no more time for peace now, the price of which was too steep for Will to pay any longer. He scanned the stream and banks with sharp eyes; it was impossible to say whether the feathered stag already waited for him in the shallows or if his desire manifested it. The stag glided to where Will stood, and he greeted it with cradling hands that stroked from nose to antlers. Will again saw himself in the stag’s eyes and knew they understood one another. He gripped his fingers around the black bone lifted from the stag’s skull and followed the creature forward toward the sunset until the ground beneath them ended and the only direction remaining was down. The further they went, the darker the water became, shifting from slate blue to gray green to nearly black. Will didn’t need to look behind him to know the setting sun would be only a speck of light; he kept his grip firm and looked ahead, trusting that he and the stag would arrive where they belonged. 

When the water around them was nearly ink, Will felt the stag relax, and his own body loosened in kind. They were no longer swimming now but floating, and when Will looked ahead, he saw the sea between worlds lightening. They were carried upward by currents or buoyancy or magic or determination-- he couldn’t say-- until black became brackish brown, then juniper green. Overhead, not so very far away, Will saw light; he held more tightly to the stag. The water lightened to the well-loved shades of a forest as they rose. This water didn’t rush like his stream, and he could see the outlines of what looked like leaves resting on the surface of the water above them, the lightened sky beyond giving them the appearance of shadows. Will longed to be in that world-- on the side where he could see the sun and the colors-- like it was a place he had come to call home and missed terribly. The shadowy shapes moved apart, separated by force, and a new one appeared just beyond the water’s surface.

A man. A man made of shadow with what appeared to be antlers rising high above him.

The stag gave a small kick, a final, impatient push as they crossed the last fifty feet from the depths to the open air above. Connected as they were, Will’s flesh to the stag’s bone, he heard the plea for trust in the tiny motion. They had come so far together; Will would not leave the stag now. As they neared the surface, the features of those shadowy shapes above them began to come into focus: The leaves were lily pads, soft edged like a watercolor painting; the shadow man’s antlers weren’t bone at all but the branches of a tree stretching overhead; even the blackened man himself was becoming streaked with golden light as the sun kissed him. 

It was morning here, in this other world, whereas the sun had been setting in Will’s own. He and the stag, it seemed, had swum straight through the liquid core of the dreamworld and emerged upright on the opposite side of that hazy globe. 

So close to the surface now that their bubbling wake had begun to spread the lily pads further apart, Will saw the man craning to watch them breach the surface, and in such close proximity, Will knew the fall of the golden hair and each plane of the bronze skin just as well as he knew the bands of darkness that still shrouded eyes and teeth. Will knew who-- what-- awaited him just beyond the emerald waters that now surrounded them. He did not release the stag until its antlers drove through the water’s surface into the air of the new world but neither did he fear the release when the great creature lept from the water.

Will allowed his stag to go free as he felt the warmth of the sun on his face. The stag bounded beyond the pond, then paused to watch as the man of darkness and light peered down into the pond Will and the stag had surfaced in. Will’s own gaze drifted from the stag to the man above him, but he knew that if he had continued watching, he would have seen the stag cantering away toward the treeline, sure of step and direction. Will set his own gaze on the amber eyes that beheld him like a long-awaited treasure instead of a capricious traveler. The man streaked in black and gold offered Will a hand and hefted him far enough up that the younger man could catch the ledge of the pond; the man braced Will as he pulled himself the rest of the way from the water. Soaking and disoriented, Will let himself roll bonelessly from the ledge to the bed of grass below, face skyward and eyes closed; the man sat on the ledge near Will’s prone body, quiet joy radiating in waves as palpable as the ones Will and the stag had created only moments earlier. Will wondered if all emotions could be touched in this world. He sunned himself in the light and the rays of appreciation-- the warmest homecoming in his memory. He sensed there would be a towering home, spires rising into the heavens, if he only looked beyond the trees encircling the pond; he considered the homecoming might not be his own.

“Will.” 

The voice-- melodic almost in its accented lilt-- shouldn’t have been a comfort. Will lifted his arm up and stretched his fingertips toward the newborn sky, a silent request for the horrifying, dazzling man to connect as the stag had, but the touch never came. Will opened his eyes and found he was alone. He rolled to his knees and darted his eyes around frantically, panic sending jolts through his limbs and under his ribcage. The world around him was utterly still-- beautiful and unmoving-- and Will knew he had made the other man vanish with nothing more than acknowledgement and nearness. He was, once again, truly alone. The pain that came with that understanding was sharp and unbidden; the cold aching in his gut and tearing stretch of his chest rattled his teeth and bones then vibrated beyond his body, rippling the water and making the trees creak. The air itself reverberated around him as he cursed the world he made for himself-- a world for one broken by the presence of another. By the time the sky began to fall in heavy droplets of white clouds, Will could only lie back in the soft grass of his imagining, open his hungry mouth, and wait for his creation to drown him. 

The booming roll of thunder somewhere above and beyond Will’s little home in Wolf Trap, Virginia, sent his eyes flickering open and his shoulders bolting upward off his bed. 

Winston and Zoe raised their heads to look at Will curiously as he flitted his eyes around the room to regain his bearings. The room and the sky outside were darker than he’d expected, and Will had the wild thought he’d slept past his final dinner with Hannibal and into the night. Will shot up the rest of the way and flipped on a lamp, eyes landing on his alarm clock: 5:30. Just in time. Will showered and dressed in double time. Running a wide-toothed comb through his wet curls just enough to tame them, he watched the sure movements of his reflection. 

Alana was right: Will was not Hannibal’s mirror; Jack was right: Will was a good fisherman. 

Will wasn’t fishing anymore. He’d left his rod and pole floating on the surface of a stream in an upside down world and followed a feathered stag to a place where the sun was only just rising. He could only hope he would know what that meant when it mattered.

He pushed aside the heavy, dark suit jacket and tie he’s chosen for this evening; those were the trappings of Will’s latest life. Will couldn’t quite distinguish the lines of what new life he had begun building for himself this evening-- or how long it would last-- but he did know it would be his, and he wouldn’t begin it in armor. He kept the black button-down but left the throat open, giving him room to breathe, and pulled out a lighter gray blazer and slacks he’d worn into a second skin over the years. 

Will welcomed the momentum that propelled him to his car, to Baltimore, to a parking space just beyond the front walk of Hannibal’s imposing home. The rain beat down in torrents, but Will pulled his coat tighter and went into the night without misgiving. After his earlier dreams, it seemed apt that he would arrive on Hannibal’s doorstep dripping and alien. The rain chilled his skin and bones as the streams and seas of his dreams did not, though; it shook his nervous system awake and widened his eyes. Will could not afford to forget that Hannibal was every ounce the tiger banded with shadows and golden light that he had always been; likewise, Will could not afford to forget that he, himself, was a wild thing of fur and feather and bone. When Hannibal appeared in the doorway, finely suited and guarded, it was clear Hannibal had not let either fact slip his mind. If Hannibal’s mask slipped for only a second, his mouth opening and gaze dropping to scan Will from head to toe, it was not enough to disarm. The eyes from Will’s dream, amber and rosewood, retained the gleam of knowing and of welcome that had been painted there by Will’s mind even as Hannibal regarded Will coolly. 

The soaking man outside the door was paralyzed by the flood of words that tried to spill from his throat. The thoughts caught on one another, jagged edges hooking and burrowing, and dammed the river. Will opened his mouth and worked his jaw, trying to find the beginning or, perhaps, the ending. 

“Come inside, Will,” Hannibal guided courteously, stepping aside. 

Will followed the direction and let the door close behind him, but he didn’t go further into the house. Time seemed both meaningless and too important now to waste. 

“Hannibal,” Will choked, rainwater running from his curls to his cheeks. 

What could be said that wouldn’t make the man vanish and the sky fall? It seemed to already sob for them.

“They know.”


End file.
